


time to leave and turn to dust

by folignos



Category: Generation Kill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-30
Updated: 2012-07-30
Packaged: 2017-11-11 02:19:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/473372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/folignos/pseuds/folignos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You’re sitting in the kitchen that you tried to paint yellow when he wasn’t paying attention, and he tried to cover in chrome and steel and black tiles when you were out buying paint, and eventually you both compromised with soft, gunmetal grey marble counters and eggshell white walls."</p>
            </blockquote>





	time to leave and turn to dust

**Author's Note:**

> THIS IS ENTIRELY HARRI'S FAULT. THAT IS THE ONLY DISCLAIMER I NEED. (This time, it actually is Harri's fault. She prompted the song, therefore blame her.)  
> This was written while listening to To Build A Home by The Cinematic Orchestra, which is where the title is also from.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault in the end. Not his, not the woman in the car, not the paramedic who couldn’t save him, and certainly not yours.

It doesn’t stop you blaming everyone though.

-

You’re sitting in the kitchen, the kitchen you built together, because he didn’t trust contractors and it’s not like you didn’t have the money, months and months of collective backpay from Iraq and Afghanistan, inheritance from his uncle, your grandmother. You asked him to build you a house, and he gave you this. Out in rural Virginia, made of concrete and granite and oak older than your great-grandparents, and perfectly him, but also you, in a way you can’t really put your finger on. It feels… felt like home.  When the exoskeleton was almost finished, he drove up to DC, took you away from meetings with book publishers, literary agents, dinners with important people whose names you could never remember and he put you on the back of his bike and took you somewhere you didn’t know. The house was empty at first, unlived in and devoid of furniture, but it was perfect, and you fell a little bit in love with the house, and a little bit more in love with him.

You’re sitting in the kitchen that you tried to paint yellow when he wasn’t paying attention, and he tried to cover in chrome and steel and black tiles when you were out buying paint, and eventually you both compromised with soft, gunmetal grey marble counters and eggshell white walls. There’s an old wood burner in the corner, because he’s a California boy through and through and doesn’t understand that anything above sixty degrees does not count as freezing. The appliances are modern and blindingly shiny, electric oven, obscenely complicated coffee maker, fridge freezer combo taller than you are, but they don’t jar with the stone floor and faded wooden cupboards, somehow. The gadgets were all his, the breadmaker, the weird sandwich toaster that hissed and spat at you when you tried to use it, the stand mixer, which also spat at you when you tried to use it. You were pretty sure kitchen appliances hated you at that point, but he’d just laugh and flick grated cheese at you, and you’d forget about it in favour of biting at his bottom lip and then stealing his sandwich anyway. All the appliances are gone now, thrown out or given to goodwill or in a box in storage, and the surfaces are thick with dust. There are footprints on the floor that you tracked in, and it looks like a ghost has been walking here.

From your seat, you can see the tree you planted together the day the house was finished. It’s as old as you, one that he brought from your parent’s house. You’re not sure how he got it from Maryland to Virginia, but he did, and it’s the one your older sister insisted on planting the day you were born. He liked having a tree that he knew exactly how old it was to the day, he said, patting soil around the roots, grinning up at you. There was dirt on his cheeks and forehead, where he’d scrubbed the back of his hand across his face, but you kissed him anyway, choking on a laugh when he’d cupped your face in filthy palms and smearing earth across your skin. You interrupted him in the shower afterwards, pressed him against the tiles and dropped kisses down his spine, curled fingers around the jut of his hip, licked him open and made his breath hitch on your name. You spread him out on the bed, still dripping wet, water cooling on his skin and you marked his neck and collarbone and inner thighs, _property of Nathaniel Fick_ written on his skin in bite marks and bruises. You made him beg, buried deep inside him so his eyes were screwed shut and his hands were fisted in the sheets underneath, made him say _please_ and _Nate_ and _fuck_ until his toes curled and his back arches and his eyelids fluttered like he was dreaming. You loved watching him like this, knowing that you’d made him like this. You loved that he let you see this, so when he collapsed onto the bed, chest heaving, hair sticking to his forehead with sweat, you slid up his chest and kissed him gently, smiling into his mouth before you rolled off and ran a cloth over you both to clean up. He always made tea afterward, a throwback from when he served with the Royal Marines, he claims. You teased him, asking who he was sleeping with that he made tea for while he was in England, and he teased back, reeling off a list of guy’s names until you pushed at his shoulder and drank the last of his tea.

You track more footprints through the house, looking in the study, the living room, the bathroom, but not the bedroom. The bed is still in there, sheets still unmade, rumpled at the bottom. They’re probably thick with dust too. You remember the curtains weren’t open when you got the phone call, and you’d left the night before’s clothes in a heap by the chair. Most of your clothes were left in the wardrobe, in the dresser. There were some in the drier that you rescued when you came back to the house, but you left everything else. You can’t go in there. You know it’s stupid, that it’s been three years, but you can’t shake the idea that it’ll still smell of him. So the door stays closed, and you move past it, only pausing to place your palm flat on the wood, to rest your forehead on it for a minute. You can see the room clear as day, like you’re standing in it yourself. You can see the bed, dark green covers almost the same shade as the walls, almost the same shade as your eyes, he’d said when they picked out paint, making the check-out girl swoon and giggle, making you flush scarlet. You can see the floor with his mother’s rug on it, the colour of coffee with just a splash of milk, and the curtains, gauzy and cream, not designed to keep the light out because you both woke before dawn anyway. You can see the book sitting on your bedside table, the reading glasses folded on top of it. There are two bookmarks in it, one near the end, and one only halfway through. You’d read it before, but he hadn’t, and you enjoyed watching him read it, chewing his lip in thought as he flicked pages. You shared books in Iraq, tossing him dog eared paperbacks when he was on watch, and he’d give them back in the morning, folded corner marking his place. You’re trying very hard not to think about the fact that he won’t ever finish it. His laptop’s in there, battery run down and useless by now, sitting on the desk in the corner where he would take it apart and put it back together, trying to coax imperceptible improvements out of it while you lounged in the bed, sometimes reading, sometimes writing.

The garage is empty, and it’s like being stabbed in the gut. You suppose it’s appropriate in a way, that he’s gone, and so is his bike, but you still weren’t expecting it somehow. Everything else is gone, why shouldn’t the bike? The difference is that it wasn’t you that took the bike from the house. The bike left with him, like it always did, and it never came home, just like he didn’t. There are still oil stains on the floor and tools left scattered across the bench. It’s another room you couldn’t bring yourself to tidy up, to clean out, because like the study was yours, the garage was his, and so you left it like it was. There’s a noticeboard up on the wall, scraps of paper pinned to it, but in the corner there’s something you haven’t noticed before, and the world goes a little grey when you realise it’s a photo of the two of you from way back at the start of OIF. You don’t remember this photo being taken, doesn’t look like you’re paying attention in the shot, not to anything that isn’t Brad, anyway. You wonder if it was that obvious back then; to other people, you mean. You look at the way you looked at him then and it’s impossible not to see, you think. You pin the photo back up among the receipts and other assorted scraps of paper that he deemed important enough to keep, and you leave, leave the garage, leave the house, without really thinking about it, and suddenly you’re outside and you’re not sure why.

You’re outside the house that you both built, and suddenly everything is hyper focused and acute, white-hot needles underneath your fingernails because he’s not there anymore. It’s not his home any more. It isn’t really your home, either, you’re not interested in anywhere that he isn’t, so now it’s just a house in the middle of Virginia, and it means nothing to you. You lock the door, put the keys in your pocket and you drive away, and you don’t stop until you run out of gas. You fill up the tank and keep driving until you reach California, and it’s still not far enough, because California is Brad, and Brad is California, tanned and blond with a surfboard in the garage even though the surf on the coast of Virginia isn’t worth shit, he always said. So you stay in LA for maybe a day before it’s too much, and you drive back to Maryland, because he isn’t in Maryland, but your family is, and even though that’s never going to be enough, it’ll have to do.


End file.
